I have been reading the book “beyond java” by Bruce Tate. Are there
any other good books or blogs of this nature ? I am really interested
in trying to keep tabs on where Rails is headed.
I know the book is a little old, but he says Rails has an
embarrassing lack of commercial support ? Is that still true ? Why is
that the case ? It seems like he makes a good point of why Rails could
find a niche where Java is very lacking, but he doesn’t really seem to
state it very strongly as if afraid to offend Java developers or
something.
I recall a Java developer said why would you use a framework
(referring to Rails) ? I later realized the obvious answer is, well
what is J2EE then ? I could hardly get a job anywhere with just Java
on my resume, you need to know a zillion Java API’s.
I started playing with Rake a bit, I have been totally turned off by
ant builds I have seen, very complicated stuff that seems very
limited. Why would I want to write code in xml anyway ?
wbsurfver wrote:
I know the book is a little old, but he says Rails has an
embarrassing lack of commercial support ?
I would call a language that only exists due to its commercial support
embarrasing…
–
Phlip
http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/9780596510657/
“Test Driven Ajax (on Rails)”
assert_xpath, assert_javascript, & assert_ajax
Howdy -
On 18-Aug-07, at 12:03 PM, Phlip wrote:
wbsurfver wrote:
I know the book is a little old, but he says Rails has an
embarrassing lack of commercial support ?
I would call a language that only exists due to its commercial support
embarrasing…
Hey Phillip - I’m not quite sure that extremity is what is being
suggested (although I’ve been fooled by trolls before).
Rails is in fact a grass-roots movement that can be characterized
well by the technology adoption lifecycle (TALC) [1].
I’m not sure where we sit on the TALC curve, but we’re on one side or
another of the chasm. At railsconf I hung out folks as varied as an
r&d lead at sap to early adopters like myself. Vendors such as
Borland (codegear), Sun and others are putting in vendor support, and
mid-sized consultancies seem to be taking building health rails
practices (thoughtworks announced 40% plus revenue from rails projects).
Perhaps you should clarify more what you mean by commercial support.
And perhaps you’ll feel more comfortable with rails as it gets wider
adoption, in which case keep your eye mainstream media which will
signal to you that rails has arrived. Until then there is a
significant community of us that are (have been) making a very joyful
career riding the wave.
Jodi
[1] Crossing The Chasm - Crossing the Chasm - Wikipedia
Hi, I guess I couldn’t resist to chime in on this thread. Rails is on
the
radar-screen of some large and mid size corporations as one poster
noted.
Next, if you’re a skilled J2EE developer, then you should not have a
problem finding a job. A corporation tends to hire a technologist that
know
many subjects areas rather than one that knows a single subject matter
in
some cases. Please take a look at some of the job postings. Some
places
are looking for people that know it all. Thus, if you have more tools
in
your toolbox that you’re fairly competent with and have experience in,
then
an potential employer would be more likely to hire you. Why? This
gives
the employer a bit more flexible in using you as a resource to the
company.
Thus, you’re value to the company grows. I would highly recommend
reading
“My Job Went to India (And All I got Was This Lousy Book)” by Chad
Fowler
because it covers this in greater detail as well as other aspects of the
job.
Next, why would you do J2EE? They are paying you to do J2EE. If you
don’t
like it, then you get another job if this is an option. In this day,
they’re many technologies that can be applied to software problem and
some
will make it easier and some will make it harder. Furthermore, there
may be
a foundation of support for the technology in use at your company.
Thus,
making it harder to transition to something better, faster, and stronger
and
switching to something may increase company risk.
Next, how does one introduce new technologies to the workplace? In most
cases, one cannot say, “I have this new technology A and I would like to
use
it on Project B…”. However, in the past, I was able to introduce new
technologies to the workplace by delivering a working prototypes of the
systems that were currently under development. Also, I provided the
standard numerical measures of the prototype and compared those to the
system that I was modeling. In short, it goods that you’re making
yourself
aware of new technologies but you should be a bit more professional
about
it. Also, if you’re looking to make your point that one technology is
better than another, then I recommend the following:
a) Do It aka implement the prototype
b) Show It aka present it to the stakeholders
c) Compare It aka provide some numerical measures
Good luck,
-Conrad
On 8/18/07, [email protected] [email protected] wrote:
I know the book is a little old, but he says Rails has an
embarrassing lack of commercial support ? Is that still true ?
Depends.
In the sense that there is no big software vendor (or a committee of
vendors) driving platform development - thankfully, yes, it’s still
true and there isn’t much to be embarrassed about.
Big vendors are starting to pay attention though.
As for lesser forms of “commercial support”, like custom app
development, consulting, production support, tools, etc, you can
totally get that for money nowadays.
–
Alexey V.
CruiseControl.rb [http://cruisecontrolrb.thoughtworks.com]
RubyWorks [http://rubyworks.thoughtworks.com]
wbsurfver wrote:
I know the book is a little old, but he says Rails has an
embarrassing lack of commercial support ?
I would call a language that only exists due to its commercial support
embarrasing…
That is so cute.
Rails, and especially Ruby can benefit tremendously from a team of
full time developers and full time sales people. The reason why RoR is
still a hobby tool after almost 3 years and .NET was used to build
enterprise applications before it was out of beta is because Microsoft
is selling it people who make decisions.
Corporations pay developers and tell them what technology to use. A
guy operating from his basement will not convince a corporation to
adopt his technology because frankly, said guy can provide zero
technical support. Limited tech support and complete lack of
enterprise tool will keep Rails from adoption.
Alex G
On Aug 18, 12:03 pm, “Phlip” [email protected] wrote:
wbsurfver wrote:
I know the book is a little old, but he says Rails has an
embarrassing lack of commercial support ?
I would call a language that only exists due to its commercial support
embarrasing…
But that’s something different, is it bad if Rails was to have some
degree of commercial support ?
I’m just interested in seeing Rails evolve and gain acceptance. I
work at a fairly large company that does web development. I have been
doing PHP for about 4 months, most of the other stuff the company does
is Java, before that I couldn’t seem to get Rails work due to my lack
of web development experience (I did alot of C++ backend work) and not
enough Rails work was out there I guess. Hardly anyone at my company
seems to take Rails very seriously.
If Rails was to become accepted and then gradually become bloated
like Java, then I figure something else would come along. I don’t see
why I should want to be affraid of that. At one time I was doing C++
and I very much wanted to do more Java stuff, now I am not very
interested in Java anymore but Rails instead, someday it could be
something else. I just want to follow the trends in languages.
It depends what one means by “commercial support”. There are, for
starters, definite signs of commercial acceptance, especially in the
area of tools. There are versions of both NetBeans and Eclipse that
support Ruby on Rails. The JRuby project may also make Rails a more
appealing web solution for companies that already have a considerable
investment in Java and J2EE. A web app running on JRuby can make use
of logic already developed in, say, Java Beans, and can be deployed to
application server as a WAR file.
// Gregory
Alex G wrote:
That is so cute.
Rails, and especially Ruby can benefit tremendously from a team of
full time developers and full time sales people. The reason why RoR is
still a hobby tool after almost 3 years and .NET was used to build
enterprise applications before it was out of beta is because Microsoft
is selling it people who make decisions.
This “hobby tool” is putting quite some butter on my bread and I even
enjoy working with it… Sorry you are not in a position to sell Rails
to your clients or employers when it’s a good match for one project.
Corporations pay developers and tell them what technology to use.
Yes, and twice the initial ETA after the project begins, they fail,
blame whoever they can to save their job (or have moved in the
organigram so aren’t acountable anymore anyway) and the cycle repeats:
read newspaper articles, believe they are somehow related to the
problems at hand, force “corporate” technical solutions on technical
teams, fail, restart somewhere else, …
Many big corporations are full of these people and indeed they provide
quite some business to service companies, feeding them fom huge pile of
cash called ‘annual computer service budget for section X’. If your main
goal is paying the bills, working with them is a no-brainer, if you want
to provide value to your customers and enjoy your work maybe you should
look for more pragmatical people to work with?
Lionel.
Alex G wrote:
I would call a language that only exists due to its commercial support
embarrasing…
That is so cute.
Rails, and especially Ruby can benefit tremendously from a team of
full time developers and full time sales people. The reason why RoR is
still a hobby tool after almost 3 years and .NET was used to build
enterprise applications before it was out of beta is because Microsoft
is selling it people who make decisions.
Yes, management by magazine rules…
…except at my non-hobby, incorporated day-job, where we went from Java
to
RoR because the developers were rewarded for identifying the technology
that
sucked least.
If our competition wants to remain mired in the flabby excesses of .NET
and
Tomcat, let them!
And don’t get me started about the comparison between RoR’s and .NET’s
tech
support…
–
Phlip
http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/9780596510657/
“Test Driven Ajax (on Rails)”
assert_xpath, assert_javascript, & assert_ajax
On 8/19/07, Alex G [email protected] wrote:
RoR is still a hobby tool
I think, this statement is at least a year and half behind the
reality. Not to mention the fact that BaseCamp and other 37 Signals
stuff is a money-making enterprise (pun intended), not a hobby, to
begin with.
guy operating from his basement will not convince a corporation to
adopt his technology
I know people in Sun, Microsoft, and a fairly large number of other
companies, including the one I’m in (ThoughtWorks), working full time
on Ruby.
complete lack of enterprise tool
Ah, that E-word again… 
What exactly is missing? “Identify and eliminate the barriers to Ruby
adoption in corporate IT world” is just about my job description in
TW, so I’m asking this with genuine interest in the subject. Thanks.
–
Alexey V.
CruiseControl.rb [http://cruisecontrolrb.thoughtworks.com]
RubyWorks [http://rubyworks.thoughtworks.com]
On 8/19/07, Alexey V. [email protected] wrote:
I know people in Sun, Microsoft, and a fairly large number of other
companies, including the one I’m in (ThoughtWorks), working full time
on Ruby.
Amazon seems to have quite a bit of internal interest in Ruby these
days.
Just as a side consideration (sorry for the troll).
For those of us who live in the world of startups, arguments in favor of
commercial support render little influence. When it comes down to it,
productivity wins out over anything else. With Rails an entrepreneur can
create a prototype in weeks vs months and hand off the product to a dev
team
who can run with the code because everything is in the same place and
standard conventions are used. In Java it’s a crap shoot as to whether
you
can find a developer who knows the stack you are using and in the case
of
PHP…good luck.
In addition it is worth noting that the ‘economy’ of tomorrow’s world
will
most likely increasingly be built on the dreams and hard-work of
basement
office developers and small dev teaams who will leverage and monitize
their
ideas on the web with limited startup capital and a whole lot of sweat
equity. In that world it sure doesn’t matter much if the framework comes
with a lifetime guarentee stamp from a large corporation. What matters
is
productivity, time to market, and usability. The last thing we want to
do is
to waste our time just trying to set up the framework/config env. In
that
world Rails shines.
In the end I suppose it’s all about the right tool for the right job.
For
now I’ll just point and laugh at the pointy-haired execs who need the
comfort of a platform backed by flashy marketing…it just means that
the
competition will be that much slower than me. 
On 8/19/07, Phlip [email protected] wrote:
full time developers and full time sales people. The reason why RoR is
sucked least.
Phlip
http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/9780596510657/
“Test Driven Ajax (on Rails)”
assert_xpath, assert_javascript, & assert_ajax
–
David Andrew T.
http://dathompson.blogspot.com
Yes but will they adopt Rails or will we see them contributing to a new
rMason framework? 
Alexey V. wrote:
What exactly is missing? “Identify and eliminate the barriers to Ruby
adoption in corporate IT world” is just about my job description in
TW
Sorry, but I don’t understand. Shouldn’t your job (at some company) be
to
deliver software features? Who cares who likes Ruby?
so I’m asking this with genuine interest in the subject. Thanks.
"If you’re looking for global enterprise solutions to integrate
distributed
systems, at the end of the day, Ruby has the momentum to leverage the
dynamic potential of synergies between your skillsets and its core
competencies on Internet time. Achieving best-of-breed,
mission-critical
componentization utilizing standards-compliant scalability, it provides
an
adaptable, standards-based framework to add value via a fast-track,
result-driven development process.
"I hope that helps answer your question. " --Jay L.
–
Phlip
http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/9780596510657/
“Test Driven Ajax (on Rails)”
assert_xpath, assert_javascript, & assert_ajax
On 8/20/07, Phlip [email protected] wrote:
Shouldn’t your job (at some company) be to deliver software features?
Yup. Look at URLs in my sig. The “barriers” thing is how we decide
what software features to deliver.
"If you’re looking for global enterprise solutions…
Scary…
–
Alexey V.
CruiseControl.rb [http://cruisecontrolrb.thoughtworks.com]
RubyWorks [http://rubyworks.thoughtworks.com]